Blog by Kari Nixon “Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” –Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience […]
Tag: Blog
Always Looking
Chloé Cooper Jones. Easy Beauty: A Memoir. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2022. ISBN 9781982151997. Book Review by Samuel Freeman A baby is born “a ball of twisted muscle and tucked bone […] bent in half” with an unexpected medical condition that turns out to be sacral agenesis, a congenital absence of the […]
Bridge Work: The Behavioural and Social Sciences in Dentistry
Blog by Patricia Neville As a social scientist working in oral health research and dental education, I am regularly frustrated about how closed dentistry is to the behavioural and social sciences. Working as a sociologist in oral health research can be a lonely place. I am treated as an “exotic animal” with “curious” tools and […]
What is an Adverse Event in a Clinical Trial?
Blog by Thomas Milovac Kow and colleagues have recently addressed the lack of quality in reporting adverse events (AEs) in trials of remdesivir, basing their analysis on guidelines recommended by the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT).1 For example, none of the trials defined an AE, and only one trial noted how researchers collected AE […]
The World Enters Our Playroom: Music and Family in the Time of COVID
Blog by Astrid de Oliveira (née Treffry-Goatley) The outside world enters our playroom, the room with the best light and internet connection in the house. The children’s bookshelf becomes the backdrop to countless television interviews, zoom calls and meetings with world leaders. In hard lockdown, which started on 27 March 2020, we suddenly morph into […]
Living with COVID: What We Learned from Patients with Incurable Cancer During Challenging Times
Blog by Hilde M. Buiting, Xiaochang Campmans, Evelien van Alphen, Michel van den Heuvel and Gabe S. Sonke. Although COVID-19 impacted everyday life and destabilized the healthcare sector across the globe,1 few studies have focused on the experiences of patients with incurable cancer (infected or not). Can such patients serve as examples for understanding other […]
Podcasting Builds Disability Culture
With funding from the Disability Visibility Project, disabled podcasters Cheryl Green and Thomas Reid are creating a space for Deaf and disabled podcasters and content creators to find each other and find audiences. The project, currently called POD Access, will host a database of Deaf and disabled podcasters and podcasts relating to deafness or disability, […]
Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions
Article Summary by Richard Gorman and Bobbie Farsides Our article, ‘Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions’ is part of our work on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Ethical Preparedness in Genomic Medicine’ research project at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. We’ve been working with a group […]
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and the Pathologization and Medicalization of Ordinary Experiences
Article Summary by Sahanika Ratnayake In the wake of prolonged grief disorder entering the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, debates over the pathologizing and medicalizing of ordinary experiences—that is, presenting what we might think of as typical experiences such as grief as disorders requiring specialised treatment—have reignited. Psychiatry of course has a long history […]
The Rehabilitation of Long Covid Requires Understanding of Not Just the Biomedical Dimensions But All Aspects of Being Human
Blog by Amali U. Lokugamage and Clare Rayner We are both senior doctors affected by multi-system long covid symptoms for almost two years now and have resorted to biomedical, humanities, artistic and complementary methods to support rehabilitation and recovery. We used art and poetry and meditation despite illness. These helped us communicate and make sense […]